Nothing special, just normal courtesy of contacting the author of the work and seeing what they think. Sometimes the license is not clear where exactly the line is drawn, and it’s good to know what they would like to see happen with the new project: example: do they prefer you keep a separate fork or want to integrate changes upstream? Just basic consideration for another person’s work, even if the license technically allows for use without reaching out.
That basically sums it up. I heard about that “fuss” (I don’t know all the details), and I just wanted to steer a wide path clear of any kind of issues like that. So I made a choice to use our own names and artwork. I talk to Emilie first and followed her recommendations, and have been in conversation with Andrew (mostly about other MetaModule things), but the choice to do AI=>CI was my own, just to avoid any potential of toe-stepping or bad feelings. Also, practically speaking, we had to re-do the artwork anyways to make legible PNGs on the small screen. So changing the names just sealed the whole deal. I also intended to move the basis of our port to the original MI module code, but it didn’t happen in time for v1.0. So using the AI names in that case wouldn’t have made much sense.
I would hope that it’s not too confusing/frustrating for users after making a few patches with the CI modules. The layouts and control/jack names are (mostly) the same, so sight recognition and “muscle-memory” (if that exists for virtualized modules?) should still be helpful. Once we add tags and search/filter for modules, it should be no issue at all (I still type “Plaits” in the VCV module browser, so even if MM called it “Macro Oscillator 2” it wouldn’t change anything for me – but maybe I’m not in the majority here?)
A conversation with the author should make it clear if this is “great! go for it!” situation or not.